


Somewhere out of context and beyond all consequences

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hospitals, Light Angst, M/M, Post-Episode: s09e25 Hana Mao 'Ole Ka Ua O Waianae (Endlessly Pours the Rain of Waianae), mentions of Danny/Rachel, once again i forced them to talk, this is a s9 post-finale fic that picks up very closely to where the cliffhanger left off
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-19 07:09:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19351990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: Danny leans a shoulder against the side of the vending machine, hands jammed in his pockets. He lasts a whole three seconds ─ he’s satisfied with that; could be worse, considering how jittery this place makes him ─ before he demands, “You mad at me?”“No,” Steve flatly tells the vending machine. “Why’d you think that?”Or: Steve and Danny are at a hospital, and for once, neither of them is dying. They (don’t) talk.





	Somewhere out of context and beyond all consequences

**Author's Note:**

> So I finally got around to watching the s9 finale last week! In it, stuff happened. This was an attempt at dealing with a tiny fraction of it. 
> 
> The title is from _Language_ , a song by Suzanne Vega.
> 
> -
> 
> This fic contains spoilers for pretty much the whole second half of season 9, but there are some very specific ones for 9.22, and it gets even more specific about (the very end of) 9.25. A little refresher about that episode, just in case: Danny chases Steve through the office and is being awkward about it, but clearly wants to talk. Steve asks him to spit it out, and in the ensuing conversation Danny says he “may have told [Steve] an untruth” and that he didn’t go to Jersey the week before, but was with Rachel on Kauai. Steve has to guess half of it, because Danny isn’t very forthcoming, even now that he’s admitting he’s been spending time alone with Rachel at all (which he kept denying until then).
> 
> They’re still talking (and in the middle of a Fifty Shades joke) when Jerry knocks at Steve’s office door to let him know that the Ezra Hassan and her son have arrived. They’re the family of a man Steve had some dealings with earlier in the season (9.10 and 9.11, mostly), and Ezra says she came to make peace for her son’s sake, but when Steve is walking her and her son out afterwards, she pulls a gun from her son’s backpack. The screen fades to black just as she pulls the trigger. At the moment she does so, both Steve and Jerry are right in front of her, so either one of them could have been hit; Danny is behind her, and we hear him say “oh my God” when the screen is already dark. That’s the cliffhanger the season ends on.

Danny hates hospitals. 

He’s always had a healthy dislike of them, because it’s only normal for a human being to want to avoid creepy places that remind you of your own frailty as much as possible. Then the thing with Charlie happened, followed years later by Grace’s car crash, as if he needed a refresher course on the completely nightmarish terror of being helpless to do anything at all for the children that he’s supposed to protect. After all of that, healthy dislike would be a comical understatement, despite the fact that both times, he was one of those unbelievably lucky parents who got to take their kid back home at the end of the day.

“I’m gonna get some coffee,” Steve announces. His leg has been restlessly bouncing for the last five minutes, which is unlike him ─ out of the two of them, Danny is the fidgety one ─ so it’s not really a surprise when he’s up and out of his creaky plastic chair before he’s even finished speaking. “Anyone want anything?”

There’s a murmured chorus of various denials from the assembled group of Five-0 and friends, mostly along the lines of “no thanks”. Eric was the last person to grab at the excuse of a coffee run just to escape the heavy, oppressive tension of the packed waiting room for a minute, and that was barely half an hour ago.

Thinking about that makes Danny bounce up, too. “Hey, wait up a sec. I’m coming with you.”

“Alright,” Steve says, but he barely glances over his shoulder and doesn’t shorten his strides at all. He could be lost in thought or genuinely that eager to flee, but neither of those are usual McGarrettian behaviors.

Steve said he was going to get coffee, but he rounds a corner and pauses at a vending machine instead. He starts studying his options with a frown and enough supposed concentration that it could make a guy think the fate of the free world hangs in the balance.

That, or the guy might think he’s being ignored just a little bit.

Danny leans a shoulder against the side of the vending machine, hands jammed in his pockets. He lasts a whole three seconds ─ he’s satisfied with that; could be worse, considering how jittery this place makes him ─ before he demands, “You mad at me?”

“No,” Steve flatly tells the vending machine. “Why’d you think that?”

Neither of them has patience to spare for that dance, so Danny rephrases. “Why are you a mad at me?”

Steve finally gives up on the machine, or at least for now, because he crosses his arms over his chest protectively and faces Danny head on. “I’m not mad at you, Danny.”

“No, you’re just disappointed,” Danny quips, but there’s more of a barb to it than he means and something at the corner of Steve’s eye twitches and it’s not funny at all.

“I’m tired, okay? Can we not do this right now?”

Steve is not the only one who can play dumb. “Do what?”

Steve’s shoulders go a little more square. It should be like watching him gear up for a fight, but instead it’s like watching him retreat into a shell. “We never finished our talk in my office, did we?”

“You mean before,” Danny’s mouth starts to say, but then his brain catches up and stops the sentence in its tracks.

Yeah, okay, so Danny is a tactless idiot who sometimes speaks before he thinks. Not exactly breaking news right there, but he wishes his slip-up of the day would have come at another time, any other time. One that doesn’t end up giving both of them a jolt of flashbacks from taking down Ezra Hassan, disarming her, cuffing her, and realizing, to the soundtrack of little Khalid’s frightened crying, that Jerry is still on the floor and hasn’t moved yet.

“Before Jerry got shot, yes,” Steve says, harshly. There’s something distracting to that harshness. Something familiar, because Danny has heard it from Steve time and again. It’s directed inward instead of out, which is more than enough to get Danny’s finely tuned Steve-is-needlessly-self-flagellating sensors to set off the alarms.

It says something about the mess inside his own head at the moment that he hasn’t picked up on it earlier, because it’s a small miracle Steve didn’t outright say “before _I_ got Jerry shot”. He’s almost definitely been thinking it.

Danny starts out easy. “You know this is not your fault, right?”

Steve’s not looking at him anymore. He’s not even pretending to be deeply fascinated by a selection of candy and power bars ─ he just watches the inspiringly eggshell-colored wall. “Yeah, I know. It never is. Doesn’t mean Jerry isn’t dying in there.”

“Hey, don’t talk like that.” Danny wants to reach out. He’s never gotten in the habit of denying himself physical comfort, so goes for it. Steve’s shoulder is warm and solid under his palm, even through Steve’s shirt. “They’re doing anything they can. Jerry’s going to be fine.”

“Don’t lie to me, Danny,” Steve says, unmoving. “It makes me sick.”

It’s like a slap to the fucking face.

Danny snatches his hand back. “What? Where on earth is this coming from?” The question might be a lie in itself, because it’s plain as day. 

He’s just not sure yet how to deal with it. Steve is right in that their conversation wasn’t over yet, but what he probably doesn’t know is that Danny had been gearing himself up to that moment for nearly a week, and then his stride got interrupted in an awful, gut-twisting way and now he feels like he’s stumbling. He can’t just pick up where they left off and finish what he started. He needs some time to regroup, but instead he chased after Steve because he’s always chasing after Steve in one way or the other, and now they’re here and he’s stuck.

This isn’t the way any of it was supposed to go. He’s lived through enough death and illness and plain old misery to know the universe doesn’t give a flying shit about _supposed to_ , but he’s also bull-headed enough that he still does, stupidly. Futilely.

Steve’s sigh sounds like it’s coming from somewhere around his toes. “You never lied to me before this thing with Rachel started back up.”

“Sure I did,” Danny says, which is probably the wrong response, but hey, tactless idiot, and also a bit of a cowardly asshole. “You really think I’m out of flour every time I don’t want to make you your stupid pancakes?”

Steve very nearly rolls his eyes, but holds back at the last second. Danny hates that he holds back. “Yeah, you also loudly announce how much you hate me at least once a week. We both know those things don’t count.”

There’s something huge and painful stuck in Danny’s throat and he can’t seem to swallow it down. He leans against the vending machine more heavily, but it’s a cold comfort, literally. “Yeah. Maybe.”

Steve uncrosses his arms and puts his hands in his pockets, in a very close and probably unknowing approximation of Danny’s position. “I just-” Steve starts, and then stops again. His eyes wander around, but there’s nothing except eggshell and gray and a row of bad chairs and a fake potted yucca plant and the vending machine, and Danny. Danny is pathetically grateful, because it means Steve’s attention has to come back to him eventually. “Why, Danny?”

“Because I couldn’t tell you,” Danny says, which sounds assholish and cowardly again, but is actually a piece of the truth. Steve’s been lied to too many times in his life, and Danny’s foolish belief that he wasn’t _really_ deceiving Steve has led to another mark in the column. He can’t fix that, but he can at least stop telling untruths, if the lump in his throat will let him.

“You can tell me anything,” Steve says, because he clearly doesn’t understand. He refolds his arms. “You know that.”

Danny shakes his head. “Not this. Not you.”

That’s the sticking point, really. Has he been denying his slowly regained closeness with Rachel to any other people? Yes, absolutely. For the longest time, he denied it to himself. The difference is that he didn’t tell other people only because he couldn’t tell Steve, who it would inevitably have reached somehow. And he couldn’t tell Steve because─

In response to the whole “not this, not you” Steve’s face cycles through an impressive range of emotions, before it finally settles on something just north of quietly horrified. “You know?”

Danny doesn’t mean to respond, but something must show on his face anyway.

“Since when?”

Since pretty much forever. Duh. It’s always been there, so close beneath the surface it’s barely buried at all, but then Steve’s thing with Lynn ended and he stopped dating completely, however much Danny prodded or teased. That was almost a full year ago, and if Danny had had any doubts left even back then, that would have put an end to it.

He can’t say any of that, even if he’s trying to tell the truth. “You don’t want to talk about this,” he points out, because it not like anyone would need an advanced degree in reading SEAL body language to come to that conclusion.

Steve dregs up some bluster from somewhere, some hidden reserve of bravado. “Right. And you know what I want.”

Danny doesn’t voice it, but the words float between them, painfully obvious now that they’ve been half acknowledged. 

_Yes_ , Danny thinks. _Me._

Steve probably sees him think it, but the way his face shuts down completely implies that he hears it, too. There’s never been a worse moment for their pseudo-telepathic bond to flare up.

“Right,” Steve repeats. He stands there for a moment, his jaw working, glaring a hole in the vinyl flooring. 

Then he does something Danny has never witnessed him do before and turns on his heel, stalking away.

*

Danny eats a tiny bag of skittles, slowly, one by one, hiding behind the vending machine. He goes looking for a toilet and then for some coffee and then he can’t stall any longer, because his jitteriness is reaching a point where he’ll start vibrating continuously if he doesn’t check for any news on how Jerry is doing. He makes one last detour by retracing his steps when he’s already down the hall from the coffee machine, but then he heads straight back for the waiting room.

Steve is in the same seat he occupied before. Nobody took Danny’s place, in the chair next to Steve’s, so Danny reclaims it. Steve glances at him out of the corner of his eyes and doesn’t acknowledge him in any other way, but he also doesn’t get up and start running, so all in all it might be a moderately good sign.

Danny offers him the second cup of coffee, the one he went back to get.

Steve takes it.

Then they sit and wait, like nothing ever happened.

*

Danny lets his thoughts wander.

He hasn’t lied to Steve since admitting that he didn’t go to Jersey last week. His getaway with Rachel really was nice, and it really was fun, and it really was any number of other bland, positive but spiritless adjectives. It had also made him realize that it wasn’t what he’d hoped for. It seemed to make Rachel realize the same thing, seeing as she told him they needed to talk the day after they got back. There’s almost a kind of routine to it now, breaking up with Rachel, but this time’s conversation over dinner about their incompatible lives and wants was by far the most mature, amicable way they’ve ever handled it.

It also made him think more seriously than ever about what he wants his life to be, and what really matters to him about how it pans out. The list is shorter than he thought it would be.

One: he wants to do anything he can to make his kids the happiest, best people they can be. This wasn’t a revelation in any way, but an obvious certainty, a goal he’s had, consciously and subconsciously, since the very first second he heard Rachel was pregnant with what would eventually grow to be Gracie. It’s one of the very few unshakable truths in his life.

Two: Steve. 

It took him a while to untangle that one, because at the heart of it, the same principle applies that applies to his kids, in that he wants ─ needs ─ Steve to be happy, no matter what. The tricky thing is that there are a lot of different ways that could play out. More importantly, it’s not just a matter of wanting Steve to be happy, it’s also one of wanting Steve, period, whatever that might mean. That one _was_ a revelation.

So far, it’s not exactly going swimmingly.

*

Deliverance comes in the form of a tiny surgeon who walks into the room with that terrible neutral look they must teach classes on at med school. They all stare at her for a long moment, and then Steve gets up with enough force to clatter his chair against the wall. That’s when the surgeon seems to realize facial expressions are a thing even for very important, live-saving humans, because she gives them all a tired smile.

Danny doesn’t really hear most of what’s being said after that, when Steve and Adam and Tani and Eric all ask for details all at once, because he’s kind of dizzy with relief. He almost gets the life squeezed out of him in a celebratory hug from Kamekona, and then one from Flippa, and then there’s some mutual celebratory backslapping with Junior, and then he’s in front of Steve, who’s grinning at him.

“So I guess I was right on the mark on this one, huh?” Danny asks. He likes to think he wouldn’t have said that if his head weren’t still spinning, but who knows, really.

Steve’s grin dims, but his face doesn’t do that godawful closing down thing it had earlier. “Too soon, Danny. Way too soon.”

“Yeah,” Danny agrees. “I suppose that’s fair.”

Steve lifts an arm and Danny’s body responds on autopilot and suddenly they’re hugging. Danny could almost cry about it, and even more so about the fact that Steve’s hug is still full-body and clingy after everything, and most of all about how soon it’s over, even though it lasts for a perfectly average amount of time.

They can’t go on like this. He has to say something.

“Hey, uh, how are Eddie and Mr. Pickles getting along these days?”

Steve’s eyebrows do something quirky and a little wary. Danny likes the first part of that more than he’d ever admit, but wants the second gone ASAP. 

“Humor me, please,” he tries. 

Steve does, because Danny has rarely had to ask him twice. “They’ve been ignoring each other. It’s been quiet. Why?”

Danny wets his lips and shrugs. It’s a carefully studied casualness that he knows Steve will see right through. Oddly enough, that’s kind of reassuring. “No reason. Just, you know, if hypothetically you still wanted to get rid of the cat, I’m hereby offering up my catsitting services. Officially, and all that.”

Steve scoffs in surprise. “What? After all your stonewalling and flimsy excuses you’re now suddenly-” He falls quiet. His surprise grows more subdued as he clearly tries to put things together but comes up short, and remains suspicious because of it. “What happened to Rachel?”

“Nothing happened to her,” Danny says, because as far as he knows, it hasn’t. “Still allergic. She’s fine.”

“Fine.” Steve repeats the word like he’s never heard it before. “Fine at her own place.”

There they go: Steve’s reached the actual point of this. 

Danny bobs his head a few times. “Well, yeah. That’s roughly what the end of our conversation would’ve been, if not for the, you know, vengeful wife of a terrorist.” He waves his hands around, pretending like he knows what the hell he’s gesturing for. “Rachel won’t be coming over anymore. Ergo, I have room in my life.” Belatedly, realizing how that sounds, he adds, “For a cat.”

Going by Steve’s face, he’s ignoring those last three words. “Really? Just like that?”

“Just like that. Not everything has to be hard and painful, Steve.”

Steve snorts, because deep inside he’s a thirteen-year-old boy. “I hope not.”

The tension snaps, suddenly, popped like a soap bubble. Danny’s heart feels lighter instantly. He still wavers for a moment, but he knows he can’t keep pulling back ─ that way disaster lies, as history has proven. And anyway, Steve’s the one who always keeps encouraging him to dive in and really go for it when he’s trying to romance someone, so there’s no reason that shouldn’t apply now that he’s romancing Steve, of all people.

“Let me take you home,” he offers, which sounds like five ordinary words, but is actually a huge leap.

He lands safely, because of course he does. It’s Steve. Steve would throw himself down on the floor if it meant breaking Danny’s fall. “And then what?”

Danny can’t seem to stop shrugging. “You shower, I make you dinner, we talk.”

The way Steve is looking at him betrays nothing less than badly hidden wonder. It’s fascinating. “Okay. Yeah. Okay.” When Steve’s eyes make a round trip over Danny’s face, Danny lets him, keeping quiet for once in his life. “After we’ve seen Jerry.”

This is not a shrugging matter, so Danny moves on to rolling his eyes expansively. No more holding back. “Obviously.”

Steve considers the room around them, but he doesn’t give off the impression of taking it as an excuse to avoid Danny’s eyes, this time. The eggshell and gray and fake plants are all still there, but something fundamental has shifted. Steve seems almost surprised to find that there’s still a world outside of their three-foot bubble, and Danny can relate. “Nothing seems very obvious to me right now,” Steve says.

“Well.” Danny watches Steve watch their friends, and then he watches Steve watch him, and he’s back to being unable to help himself. He reaches out to brush some imaginary lint from Steve’s shoulder. “You’re just gonna have to get used to the new status quo then, won’t you?”

Steve’s grin is back. “I guess so.” He takes his turn bridging the distance and makes use of it to cup a warm hand around Danny’s elbow. “Come on.”

Danny lets Steve lead him over to the others to rejoin the impromptu mini party. He can already see a frowning nurse approach from down the hall, but he has a premonition that she isn’t going to have much luck reigning in their group. Personally, at least, he’s definitely in the mood for celebration.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want, let me know what you think! I love hearing about it. ❤
> 
> I'm on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
